Kerry’s Trials

What the candidate learned as a lawyer.

John Kerry graduated from Boston College Law School in 1976, when he was thirty-two years old and on the brink of obscurity. His celebrity as the former leader of Vietnam Veterans Against the War was fading. The war was over, and his much heralded testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was five years in the past. He had entered law school after losing a congressional election in 1972, a race he was widely expected to win. A story about him in the Boston Globe during this time ran under the headline “once a hot political property.”

Kerry practiced law for six years. During that period, he began inching back into public view in Massachusetts, rebuilding a reputation both for aggressive investigation and for showmanship which he still enjoys today. The issues that mattered to him then have dominated his subsequent legislative career, and it is his brief career as a lawyer, more than his record as a protester, that could suggest what kind of President he would make.

Given his background in the antiwar movement and progressive politics, Kerry might have seemed like a natural for a public defender’s office. “That’s a stereotype of the worst order and a total knee-jerk reaction,” Kerry told me during a recent conversation about his legal career. “I always had a prosecutor’s mind and a prosecutor’s bent. It was always what I wanted to do, even in law school. There was a rule in Massachusetts that allowed law students to prosecute misdemeanor trials in front of six-person juries, and I got an unbelievable amount of experience before I even graduated.” For a politically ambitious young lawyer like Kerry, especially one who was known only as a protester, it also made sense to earn a law-enforcement credential.

After graduation, Kerry was hired as an assistant district attorney under John J. Droney, who was the district attorney of Middlesex County, the largest county in the state, with more than a million residents and encompassing the cities of Cambridge and Lowell. “He knew of me because I’d already run for office, and we shared a mutual connection to Senator Kennedy,” Kerry said. Droney was a major figure in Massachusetts legal and political circles. He served as the Cambridge coördinator for John F. Kennedy’s first race for Congress, in 1946; became district attorney in 1959; and kept a seemingly unassailable hold on the office for the subsequent two decades.

By 1976, Droney was suffering from what was later revealed to be A.L.S., or Lou Gehrig’s disease. “He was moving very slowly, and he couldn’t speak clearly,” William Codinha, another assistant district attorney during this period, said. “If you knew him, you could understand what he was saying, but if you didn’t it would have been virtually impossible.” Droney was running for reëlection in 1978, and he decided to make Kerry his first assistant. According to Codinha, it was “to put a face on the office when Mr. Droney couldn’t get around. And John Kerry was a great face to put on the office.”

Kerry’s promotion to first assistant less than a year after his graduation from law school prompted understandable chagrin among others in the office. “John was not from the same socioeconomic background as most of the other prosecutors, that’s for sure,” John Markey, a colleague from this era, said. “Most people came from the local communities. They were kids who worked their way through Suffolk law school or maybe night law school.” People said that Kerry was motivated more by personal ambition than by idealism—the kind of complaint he has inspired throughout his career.

“To become first assistant, traditionally, you had to pay your dues and work your way up,” Thomas Hoopes, whom Kerry hired as a prosecutor, said. “Mr. Droney jumped John over virtually all of that, and, in the end, it made no difference. John built this thing from a sleepy backwater operation into a real powerhouse. He transformed it, professionalized it into the premier shop in Massachusetts.”

When Kerry started at the Middlesex County D.A.’s office, it still employed part-time prosecutors, and police officers were allowed to try some misdemeanor cases. Many prosecutors did not have their own telephones. “There was a box in the middle of the office with index cards with all the day’s cases,” one prosecutor recalled. “If someone had taken that box, there would have been no way to run the office.” According to Rikki Klieman, a fellow-prosecutor who went on to become a prominent defense attorney and, later, an anchor on Court TV, Kerry was tireless. “If I got in at 6 a.m., he was there,” Klieman said. “If I left at midnight, he was still there. He told me what he was going to do. He said, ‘I am going to make this into a first-class office.’ You wanted to follow him around like a lapdog.” Others, especially old-timers, were not so pleased with the changes. “Kerry was just a total egomaniac, and he knew a lot less about what was going on in that office than he let on,” Michael Flynn, a defense attorney who worked extensively in Middlesex County in this period, said. To be sure, Kerry’s industry became the stuff of later campaign exaggerations: he has boasted that he wiped out an inventory of eleven thousand cases, but the Boston Globe has reported that during his tenure the entire superior-court caseload, including backlog, never exceeded seven thousand two hundred and sixty-five cases.

Most county prosecutors’ offices, including the one in Middlesex, were extremely insular operations, with few meaningful contacts beyond their borders. Kerry reached all the way to Washington in order to overhaul the office and, most dramatically, its budget. Under President Carter, the Justice Department was making grants to local prosecutors, and Kerry proved adept at tapping into those funds. “We hired a full-time grant writer, and I got more federal money than any other office in the country,” Kerry told me. With the money—a reported $3.8 million—he initiated a raft of new programs: a priority prosecution program that sought to bring violent offenders to trial in less than ninety days; an organized-crime task force; an arson task force. Kerry, who held press conferences announcing each policy victory—a Boston journalist later dubbed him Live Shot Kerry—also captured the progressive spirit of the times. “We created the first victim-assistance unit in the country, and we got a grant for it, and we had a rape-counselling unit, too,” he said. The Massachusetts legislature eventually mandated similar units for all prosecutors’ offices. Amy Singer, the state’s first victim-assistance coördinator, said, “When we started, there was no separate waiting room for crime victims, and nobody would talk to them about the next steps in their cases. Everyone knows about restraining orders now, but John had to fight to make it easier to get one, so you wouldn’t have to throw yourself on the floor in front of a clerk to persuade him that you were worthy.” There were only about two dozen prosecutors in the office when Kerry took over as first assistant, and, within three years, he had built that number to almost a hundred; many of his new hires were women.

Kerry has vivid memories of the daily obligations of running a D.A.’s office, some of them bizarre. “Once I got a call in the morning from the chief of police of Somerville, and he told me, ‘We are about to arrest the mayor for rape,’ ” Kerry said. “I told him, ‘Before you make any arrests, I want you in my office in an hour.’ So he starts telling me about the case, and the case gets weirder and weirder by the moment. To make things even more complicated, the victim in the case was male. So we bring in the victim, and we ask him to take a lie-detector test, and as soon as he comes in he breaks down and says the whole thing was a lie. Just totally broke down, said it never happened, blah blah blah. If that accusation had been made in public, there is no way that the mayor’s reputation would ever have recovered, even if it had been later proved false.”

But administrative adroitness could take Kerry only so far. Among insiders, the real test of any prosecutor is how he handles a high-profile case in front of a jury. “People were very suspicious of his celebrity, about whether he was a show horse or a workhorse,” John Markey said. “It took a while for people to see that John was not only going to talk the talk but walk the walk as well. And the ultimate proving ground for a prosecutor is the trying of difficult cases. Everyone wanted to see if Kerry could do it, too.”

By the mid-seventies, George Edgerly had become notorious in Massachusetts. In 1959, the headless body of his wife, Betty, had been fished out of the Merrimack River, and Edgerly was charged in her death. “The Torso Murder,” as it was dubbed by the tabloids, caused a sensation in the state. During Edgerly’s trial, his lawyer, John Tobin, allowed the jury to learn that his client had failed a polygraph examination. In the middle of the trial, Tobin needed to enlist an expert in the then novel technology, in order to question the polygraph examiner. There were only two trial lawyers in the country who could do the job. One had just been appointed to the bench in Alabama, and the other was a recent graduate of Boston University Law School who had run a private-investigation firm while he was still a student—F. Lee Bailey.

“George was an interesting guy, pretty unflappable. He was screwing both his mother-in-law and his wife’s sisters. That was evidence in the trial,” Bailey told me. “He was sitting in an iron cage in the middle of the courtroom, which is where defendants used to have to sit in those days.” Bailey skewered the polygraph examiner on cross-examination and, when Tobin became ill, delivered the summation himself. Edgerly was acquitted, and Bailey’s career as a trial lawyer was born.

A short time later, Edgerly went to work at Butler Chevrolet, in Lowell, and became involved in an extensive scheme to submit fake warranty claims to General Motors. The practice, which was known as “writing water,” netted at least six hundred thousand dollars. When the parent company sent a representative, Francis Smith, to investigate the Butler operation, he was murdered, and Edgerly immediately became a prominent suspect. He was charged with murder, and while the case was proceeding he was convicted of fraud.

Soon Edgerly became a suspect in a rape. “Edgerly was a famous guy at that point, very elusive to prosecutors, and this rape case was very difficult, one-on-one,” John Markey said. The alleged victim was a prostitute, which made the case particularly challenging for the prosecution. Worse still, the victim had initially gone to the police and claimed that Edgerly had offered her two thousand dollars to drop the case; she later admitted that Edgerly had done no such thing. As Kerry’s former colleague Bill Codinha remembered, “Kerry told me this Edgerly was a lucky guy. This could be a snakebit case. It was not a slam dunk. Nobody was going to try that case if you were looking just to put a notch in your belt.”

Despite all the problems, Kerry decided to try the rape case against Edgerly himself. “It was an improbable kind of case,” Kerry recalled. “The victim was very suspect because of her life style and background. The bottom line was that she did not consent, the bottom line was that she had been raped.” In those days, rape shield laws protecting a victim’s sexual history were still new, and successful prosecutions of cases of rape against prostitutes were rare. “It was almost unheard of to bring this kind of prosecution,” Kerry said. “I thought she deserved justice, like anyone else.”

Cameron Kerry, John’s brother, was in law school at the time of the Edgerly trial, and he remembers seeing his brother in the law library, struggling with the issues raised by the case. “He had to impeach his own witness, which was difficult to do under Massachusetts law at the time,” Cameron Kerry said. “And mostly there was the idea of establishing that even prostitutes had the right to say no, which made it in some sense a landmark case.”

Under Kerry’s questioning, the victim told the jury that she had met Edgerly at the Cosmopolitan Café in Lowell on the night of January 1, 1975. (The bartender testified that she was a regular customer.) She had a drink with Edgerly, then followed him to another bar, where they were joined by two other men. When she said she wanted to return to the Cosmopolitan, she and Edgerly got in the back seat of a car, and the two other men got in front. Edgerly attempted to force her to have intercourse and then coerced her into oral sex. Afterward, one of the men in the front seat climbed in back and made her perform oral sex. The third man then got in the back seat with her, but agreed with the victim to merely “fake” sex with her. She was hysterical when she returned to the Cosmopolitan Café.

In court, the victim admitted that Edgerly had never offered her two thousand dollars to drop the case, but that she asked him for the money. A witness testified that Edgerly said, “All right. I’ll pay the two thousand dollars,” testimony that helped prove that he had something to hide. The jury found Edgerly guilty of rape, and the judge sentenced him to eighteen to thirty years in prison.

Edgerly was also convicted of the murder of Smith, the representative from General Motors, and several other crimes, and, at the age of seventy-six, he remains in a Massachusetts prison. I recently wrote to Edgerly about his experience with the Presidential candidate, and he wrote back that “Kerry is without morals, ethics, or principles and completely without conscience.” Edgerly declined to speak with me, but added, “You could perform a service by furnishing me with a name and address of someone in the Pres. Bush reelection campaign.”

The election of 1978 presented John Droney with the first serious opposition of his career. Scott Harshbarger, a young public-interest lawyer and former assistant state attorney general, was vigorous and energetic—a stark contrast to Droney, who, because of his illness, was largely invisible to the public. So, as Droney had planned, Harshbarger found himself mostly campaigning against the incumbent’s charismatic surrogate, John Kerry. “John clearly felt that he was the heir apparent,” Harshbarger recalled recently, “and anybody else who indicated that he could win that race—that is, me—was a threat to him. Had John been the candidate in ’78, I probably wouldn’t have had a chance, since he was so attractive. But I was running against Mr. Droney, not him.” By some accounts, Kerry wanted Droney to step down, so that he could run himself, but Kerry denies this assertion. He recalled the campaign as a time of great effort and collaboration, saying, “It was very difficult. Mr. Droney was preoccupied with fighting his health situation. All of us started to chip in, and we all carried the effort, and Mr. Droney was very smart, and very shrewd, and very wise about what he needed to do and not do in the campaign. I persuaded him to put an ad on TV, talking about what we were doing in the office, and we managed to pull it out.” Droney defeated Harshbarger by about two per cent of the vote.

It was only after the election, though, that Droney’s real cleverness became apparent. Though Kerry had looked like Droney’s designated successor throughout the 1978 campaign, Droney had no intention of stepping down—and Kerry had no inclination to devote his career to being first assistant to anyone. “Everyone knew that Mr. Droney had made Kerry what he was,” Harshbarger said, “so, politically, he didn’t think he could have broken with Droney and run against him. It would have just reinforced the image of him as ambitious. So John pretty much had to leave the office.” Kerry portrays his departure from the Middlesex D.A.’s office, after the 1978 election, somewhat differently: “Mr. Droney felt better and came back to a more active involvement in the office, and in my judgment I had already done the job. I wanted the adventure of trying something else. As he felt better, which he did, it didn’t make sense for me not to do as much as I had done previously.” (In 1982, without Kerry as his surrogate, Droney lost to Harshbarger by a wide margin. Harshbarger served two terms, then won election as state attorney general. John Droney died in 1989, after a sixteen-year bout with Lou Gehrig’s disease.)

In 1979, John Kerry and a colleague at the D.A.’s office, Roanne Sragow, opened the firm of Kerry & Sragow, at 60 State Street, in downtown Boston. Sragow, who was born in New York and grew up in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, graduated from Tufts and Boston College Law School, and was one of the star assistant district attorneys during Kerry’s tenure in Middlesex County. She and Kerry later became romantically involved.

It was, it seems, a relatively carefree moment in Kerry’s life. He was clearly casting about for a political office to run for. As his former colleague Rikki Klieman recalled, “He said he wanted one day to be President of the United States. I wouldn’t call it a joke, just more of an offhand remark. He meant it.” The law practice was a pleasant way to bide his time. Kerry prided himself on his homemade cookies, and during this period he and a friend, K. Dun Gifford, opened a cookie stand in Quincy Market. They called the business Kilvert and Forbes, after their mothers’ maiden names. Kerry sold his interest years ago, but the cookie emporium still exists, selling adaptations of the Senator’s original recipes. (Chocolate-chocolate-chunk cookies, based on a recipe by Kerry’s mother, remain especially popular.)

One of Kerry and Sragow’s more memorable cases involved a series of patients who had received a horrific treatment for baldness: implants of carpet fibres, in an attempt to simulate actual hair. “They were absolutely fascinating. I loved those cases,” Kerry recalled. “They represented a really grotesque abuse of people. You’d see the photographs of the infections they got. It was just awful. The patients figured since we were new and young they would see if we could try the case.” Kerry and Sragow won the first trial, and settled the rest of the implant cases. The authorities were also persuaded to clamp down on any further such “hair” implants.

Kerry’s background as a prosecutor made criminal work unappealing to him. “I took a court appointment once in a criminal case, and I realized I just didn’t want the guy out on the street,” Kerry told me. “I knew he was guilty. It takes a certain kind of makeup as a lawyer to dedicate yourself to having someone like that out on the street. I know our system says someone has to represent everyone, but I just couldn’t do it. I went to the court and asked them to take me off the case.” But Sragow and Kerry did take on another criminal matter, and it turned out to be the most significant experience of his brief legal career.

Shortly after dawn on the morning of October 14, 1966, two bandits stole nearly twenty thousand dollars in payroll cash from the Railway Express office in Boston’s South Station. When Michael Shaw, a railway clerk, struggled for control of one of the bags of cash, he was shot through the head. He later died of his wounds. Witnesses soon identified one of the robbers as a notorious Boston hood named William (Silky) Sullivan.

The other defendant, George Reissfelder, was arrested in a more roundabout way. Then twenty-six years old, Reissfelder already had a substantial criminal record—an armed robbery when he was seventeen, bad-check charges, and domestic violence against his wife. On the night of the murder of Michael Shaw, Reissfelder told his girlfriend that he was planning an armed robbery in South Boston. This information alarmed the girlfriend, who told her father of the plan, and he went to the police. Even though South Station is not in South Boston, the tie was close enough for the police, and they rousted Reissfelder the following afternoon. They found a gun, which tests later showed had not been fired, but which a witness said looked like one that had been brandished during the South Station murder, and Reissfelder was charged as Sullivan’s accomplice. Prosecutors asked for the death penalty for both men.

One night during the trial, in July of 1967, a lawyer from Reissfelder’s defense team, John Costello, met the head of homicide investigations for the Boston Police Department. The officer made an astonishing revelation: he knew Reissfelder was innocent. “He told me, ‘We know your guy wasn’t there,’ ” Costello said recently. “They didn’t want to lose the conviction of Sullivan, because they knew he was the right guy, by admitting they had the wrong guy with Reissfelder.” The authorities apparently figured that if they admitted they were wrong about Reissfelder, the jury might think they were wrong about Sullivan, too. “It was a death-penalty case,” Costello went on, “and they were thinking this way. It was unbelievable.” Costello brought the officer’s admission to the attention of the judge, but the officer denied making the statement, and the trial continued. Three eyewitnesses identified Reissfelder as one of the robbers, and both he and Sullivan were convicted and sentenced to life in prison.

In 1974, Reissfelder won a one-day furlough from prison, and he fled the state. He was on the lam for three years until he was caught passing a bad check in Florida; when he was arrested, he tried to pull a gun on the police. He was returned to prison in Massachusetts, and resumed serving his life sentence. But his story caught the interest of a fellow-inmate who dabbled as a jailhouse lawyer, and in 1980 the inmate wrote a brief that persuaded a judge to assign a lawyer to represent Reissfelder. The judge chose Roanne Sragow.

Sragow visited Reissfelder in prison and told him that, given the uncertainties in the case and the fact that he had already served about ten years, she might be able to get him released on a plea bargain. But Reissfelder insisted that he was innocent and said that he wouldn’t plead guilty to anything. Sragow started digging into the case. Learning of her involvement, John Zamparelli, the lawyer who represented Silky Sullivan at trial, appeared at her office one day and said, “As God is my witness, the cops knew it, the prosecutor knew it, the judge knew it—this guy Reissfelder was not guilty.” As Zamparelli told me, “George had a record, and the cops were dying to get the case closed. The sad part was, the cops even knew who the guilty party was. And he’s still at large today.”

“Roanne was the court-appointed attorney, and I was the helper,” Kerry said. “She did the lion’s share of the work, but that case taught me a lot.” Several mornings, around dawn, Sragow and Kerry prowled the loading docks in South Boston, looking for an alibi witness, a man who had refused to testify for the defense at the first trial because he was wanted by loan sharks. They eventually found him, but the turning point in the case came when they learned that Silky Sullivan, who had died of leukemia in prison in 1972, had sought out a priest for a deathbed confession.

Kerry and Sragow researched the law and found that if Sullivan had spoken to the priest in a “non-sacramental” setting the conversation would not be protected by the priest-penitent privilege. They tracked down the priest, the Reverend Edward Cowhig, who signed an affidavit saying that Sullivan “stated that Mr. Reissfelder was not involved in the incident at Railway Express in Boston, and that he was sorry that Mr. Reissfelder had been convicted for something he didn’t do.” Cowhig said that he hadn’t come forward for eight years because he “was aware of the existing climate toward any inmate who said he ‘didn’t do it’ even if a ‘do-gooder’ chaplain endorsed and corroborated it.” During Reissfelder’s years in prison, his wife divorced him, his parents died, and his children were placed in foster care.

The timing of the Reissfelder case was propitious for Kerry. By the summer of 1982, he was running in a Democratic primary for lieutenant governor of Massachusetts, and his efforts on behalf of the wronged inmate were drawing attention in the local press. On June 21, 1982, Sragow and Kerry appeared in a Boston courtroom with ten witnesses at a hearing to request that Reissfelder receive a new trial. A Boston detective testified that he had told an officer on the case that he had heard that others, not Reissfelder, committed the crime, and was told, “Don’t rock the boat, kid. We’re all set.” Even in this moment, Kerry was dogged by his reputation for grandstanding. The judge, Andrew R. Linscott, denied Kerry and Sragow the chance to make a closing argument, because he didn’t want to afford Kerry the opportunity to show off for the press.

Still, Linscott ruled that Reissfelder was entitled to a new trial, and the district attorney declined to bring the case again. Kerry travelled to Florida in order to persuade the authorities there to drop the case stemming from the time that Reissfelder was an escapee. On the day of Reissfelder’s release, August 30, 1982, two weeks before the Democratic primary, Sragow, Kerry, and the former inmate, who was now forty-two, were photographed having a beer together in Quincy Market.

Kerry has often cited the Reissfelder case as a reason he opposed the death penalty. He has modified his opposition in recent years, and he now supports the execution of convicted terrorists. “George wasn’t a great guy—he had done some things wrong, that was part of the problem,” Kerry said. “But he didn’t commit murder. His case convinced me of the mistakes that are made, that the system had made mistakes and what can happen in an overzealous prosecution.” In November of 1982, Kerry was elected lieutenant governor, and two years later he was elected to the Senate.

Roanne Sragow prospered, too, in the years after her partnership with Kerry. She is now married to Richard Licht, the former lieutenant governor of Rhode Island, who is running Kerry’s campaign in that state. Since 1990, Sragow has been a trial-court judge in the same Middlesex County courthouse where she and Kerry met as prosecutors.

George Reissfelder, for his part, never received reparations for the time he spent in prison (a compensation bill proposed in the Massachusetts legislature failed in committee). According to a report in the Boston Herald, Reissfelder became involved with a cocaine-distribution ring in Dorchester that was led by a man named Carmello Merlino. Merlino was at one point a suspect in the still unsolved theft of art works from Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, in 1990. One day the following year, Merlino told the authorities that he was worried that he had not heard from his friend in several days. Reissfelder’s body was found in his apartment; he had died of cocaine poisoning.

Kerry called his years as a lawyer “a great education,” and he has applied the lessons he learned as a prosecutor to his political career. In the Senate, he has made his mark more as an investigator than as a legislator. His senior colleague Edward Kennedy has been the master lawmaker of the Massachusetts delegation, and Kerry has concentrated instead on leading attention-getting probes of such issues as the fate of American prisoners of war in Vietnam and the collapse of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International. Kerry’s investigations have been unusually thorough by congressional standards; his conclusion that there is no evidence that prisoners remain in Vietnamese hands has never been seriously questioned. Kerry’s inquiries, in the mid-nineteen-eighties, about the work of a then obscure White House aide named Oliver North launched the investigation into the Iran-Contra affair. In the late eighties, Kerry found that the Reagan Administration had “turned a blind eye” to the Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega’s drug trafficking.

Kerry’s years as a lawyer seem to have taught him a more explicitly political lesson as well. Like Bill Clinton, he has used tough-on-crime positions to offset an otherwise predictably liberal profile. Not coincidentally, one of the few major bills that Kerry has passed grew out of Clinton’s proposal to add a hundred thousand officers to police departments around the country. Kerry’s approach may be unapologetically big government—more cops, more prosecutors, more victims’ services, more federal grants to counties like Middlesex—but the goal is decidedly mainstream. In all, Kerry’s achievements as a lawmaker, while real, are also modest. To parlay them into the Presidency would be, by far, the most successful advocacy of his career. ♦

Jeffrey Toobin has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1993 and the senior legal analyst for CNN since 2002.